The American Vice Presidency (56 page)

Afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease in later life, Wallace died on November 18, 1965, in Danbury, Connecticut. For four years he arguably had been the most involved and helpful vice president in the administration in which he served since Martin Van Buren. But his strong independent streak and developing anti-war positions eventually cast him as an outsider focused on a worldview that many Americans came to see as visionary, but others condemned as naive or even disloyal.

HARRY S. TRUMAN

OF MISSOURI

T
he thirty-fourth vice president was a former midwestern haberdasher, county judge, and U.S. senator who, less than three months after assuming the office, found himself in the presidency at one of the most critical junctures in the nation’s history.

Born a common farm boy to John and Martha Ellen Young Truman on May 8, 1884, on a six-hundred-acre farm of his grandfather’s near the small town of Lamar, Missouri, young Harry Truman had no middle name, just the middle initial
S
. It was the result of a compromise in honoring his two grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.
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As a young boy Harry suffered from poor eyesight. Fitted with thick-lensed eyeglasses, he avoided sports and opted instead for heavy reading.

In 1890, the family moved to Independence to afford young Harry a proper education, and in 1900 he got his first real taste of politics when his father took him to the Democratic National Convention in Kansas City, where William Jennings Bryan was nominated for the presidency a second time. In 1903 when the family went bankrupt after speculating in grain futures, the Trumans moved to Kansas City, where his father got a job as a night watchman at a grain elevator. Harry yearned for a career in the army, but his weak eyesight cost him a West Point appointment, so he took up a job as a clerk in a local bank until 1905, when the Trumans moved to another farm, outside Harrisonville. Upon his father’s death in
1914, Harry took over working the large spread, spending much of his free time practicing on the family piano and delving into American history.
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The work was hard and the return minimal. In the meantime, Harry had met and started dating a young local woman, Elizabeth (Bess) Wallace, and after a year proposed marriage in 1911, but she turned him down. He persisted over the next six years, to no avail. He involved himself in some mining ventures that disappointed him,
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and when the United States entered the war in Europe in 1917, he enlisted. At age thirty-three he was two years over the draft-age limit and, in any event, qualified for exemption as a farmer critical to the war effort. But he left the farm in the hands of his mother and sister, got into the army by memorizing the eye chart used to check his vision, and was given command of a National Guard company in Kansas City, with the rank of first lieutenant. In France, he led Battery “D” of the 129th Field Artillery into the Meuse-Argonne sector in the final days of fierce fighting before the armistice ending the war.
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Through all this, Harry regularly wrote to Bess, describing the war and thereafter the sights in Paris from the view of this unsophisticated farm boy. Upon his return home, they were finally married in Independence on June 28, 1919, and moved in with her mother in what proved to be a permanent arrangement.
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A month prior to the wedding, Harry and a local wartime buddy, Eddie Jacobson, a former clerk at a Kansas City clothing store who had run a canteen with Harry in the army, leased a store in downtown Kansas City. They opened a men’s haberdashery—shirts, ties, and all the other accessories of the modern smart gentleman’s attire. The business started off with a burst of success, and Harry was a personal advertisement for the store, always nattily dressed.

One day in 1921, another old army buddy named Jim Pendergast dropped by with his father, Mike Pendergast, head of the city’s Tenth Ward Democratic Club. Harry was surprised to be asked whether he might want to run for the eastern Jackson County judgeship. It was more an administrative than a judicial position, overseeing road contracts and the like, and he immediately accepted.
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Around this same time, with a postwar drop in farm prices and general recession, the Truman and Jacobson enterprise went bankrupt, and Harry spent the next fifteen years paying off debts accumulated from the store.
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Fortuitously he was elected as county judge in February 1922 for a two-year term, paying $3,465 a year. Harry wrote later of the period, “Went into business all enthusiastic. Lost all I had and all I could borrow.… Mike Pendergast picked me up and put me into politics and I’ve been lucky.”
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He made clear it was Mike who was his original savior, not Mike’s brother Tom, who came to be the boss of the notorious Pendergast Democratic machine in Kansas City but was unknown to Truman until later.

After only two years as a county judge, however, a split in the Democratic ranks cost Truman his judgeship, which was lost to a Republican. The defeat in 1924, his only one in twenty-six more years in public life, was lightened by the birth of his only child, Mary Margaret, destined to play a central if uncommon role in her father’s political career. While waiting to run again in 1926, Truman sold memberships to the Kansas City Automobile Club and kept in touch with Jim and Mike Pendergast. He also finally met Tom Pendergast, who persuaded him to run for chief judge on his old court, and he won two four-year terms.

During this time, the Pendergast machine thrived financially under boss Tom through local and state patronage and government contracts for roads and other public construction works. Part of Truman’s mandate was awarding and overseeing such contracts, and he guardedly avoided suspicions of real or imagined favoritism on the part of the machine. He proposed and pushed through a bond issue for a new network of county roads built by low-bid contractors, later lauded by the Independence
Examiner
. As for Tom Pendergast, Truman wrote of one conversation with him regarding three complaining contractors: “These boys tell me you won’t give them contracts,” Pendergast began. Truman replied, “They can get them if they are low bidders, but they won’t get paid for them unless they come up to specifications.” Pendergast told the complainers, “Didn’t I tell you boys? He’s the contrariest cuss in Missouri.”
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Truman’s success as the presiding judge of Jackson County and his ability to get along with the Pendergast machine on his terms led him to approach Tom Pendergast in 1934 about running for the U.S. House of Representatives. The party boss had already promised the nomination to someone else and countered with an offer to be the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, an offer already turned down by three other Democrats.
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While the offer gave Truman considerable organizational support in the
Democratic primary against two Missouri congressmen, he had to combat allegations of being a mere tool of the machine. He survived and won the seat on the basis of his reputation as an honest and hard-working county judge. In the Senate, he avoided the spotlight and plunged into committee work. In his first term as a member of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, he coauthored, along with Chairman Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a new transportation act regulating rail, truck, and other shipping interests.

Truman’s hopes for a second term, however, were imperiled by the prosecution of his benefactor Tom Pendergast for tax fraud in 1939. Truman came to Pendergast’s defense, telling the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
that “political animus” was involved, adding, “I am not one to desert a ship when it starts to go down.”
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Pendergast was convicted, but the anti-Pendergast vote split, and Truman was reelected.
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American preparedness was now expanding in the face of the war in Europe. Truman, as a member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, a colonel in the reserves, and aware of the shortage of army officers in early 1941, sought a commission from U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. Marshall told him that at fifty-six he was too old (“We don’t need old stiffs like you—this will be a young man’s war”) and that he could do more in the Senate to advance national defense.
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So Truman called on Roosevelt at the White House and proposed the creation of a special Senate committee to oversee the implementation of defense contracts. The result was the Truman Committee, which catapulted its founder into national prominence as war came closer and eventually enveloped America. Truman traveled the country tirelessly as a watchdog of what, after Pearl Harbor, became the nation’s war production effort, while continuing to give strong support to FDR’s New Deal agenda.

Truman’s performance and the machinations of some good political friends were soon to put him on the path to the vice presidency. When Roosevelt decided in July 1944 that he would run for a fourth term, he was persuaded by his chief political strategists that Wallace should not be retained as his running mate. Apparently to let Wallace down easily, the president insisted on going through a masquerade that ultimately brought Truman into the picture. FDR disingenuously told Wallace he preferred him but was leaving the choice to the convention delegates.

As related in the previous chapter, the anti-Wallace strategists dined with Roosevelt at the White House in what FDR’s poker-playing friend and raconteur George Allen dubbed “the conspiracy of the pure at heart.” They did not consider Wallace one of them, but rather an altruistic do-gooder with an otherworldly air foreign to their club. As Allen wrote, “They were determined that Roosevelt’s successor would not be the boomerang-throwing mystic from the place where the tall corn grows.”
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The list of Wallace’s possible replacements started quite naturally with James F. Byrnes, oft referred to as the “assistant president” and FDR’s original preference. But Ed Flynn, the New York party boss, had already reported that Byrnes wouldn’t do, “because he had been raised a Catholic and had left the Church when he married, and the Catholics wouldn’t stand for that; organized labor, too, would not be for him; and since he came from South Carolina, the question of the Negro vote would be raised.”
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Flynn wrote later that he and the president “went over every man in the Senate to see who would be available, and Truman was the only one who fitted.” Flynn continued promoting Truman, saying his record as head of the Senate investigating committee on the defense program was “excellent,” his labor votes were good, he came from a border state, and had never made any “racial” remarks. Of Truman, Flynn wrote, “He just dropped into the slot. It was agreed that Truman was the man who would hurt him [FDR] least.”
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During the strategists’ dinner, the president suddenly injected the name of the liberal Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, who at age forty-nine seemed to intrigue him. Observing that because of his youth he had “a kind of Boy Scout quality,” Roosevelt added that he played an “interesting game of poker” and had finished at the top of his class at the Columbia Law School. None of the political bosses at the table seemed interested; Douglas, like Wallace, was not a professional politician as they were.
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Finally, Roosevelt turned to Hannegan and said, “All right, Bob. Start talking.” The party chairman seized the opportunity to boost his fellow Missourian Harry Truman as a loyal, popular, and effective New Deal senator who, in coming from a border state, could help the ticket in the South. Roosevelt raised the question of Truman’s age, which he thought was nearly sixty. FDR’s son-in-law John Boettiger was sent to fetch a Congressional Directory, which showed that Truman had just reached sixty,
but Pauley intercepted it and held it before Roosevelt could ask again. The president finally cut off the meeting by saying both Truman and Douglas looked like strong candidates and, according to some recollections, turned to Hannegan and said, “Bob, I think you and everyone else here want Truman.”
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As the visitors got up and started out of the room, the president took Postmaster General Frank Walker aside. “Frank,” he asked, “will you go over tomorrow and tell Jimmy [Byrnes] that it’s Truman and that I’m sorry it has to be this way?”
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On the stairs down to the first floor, Walker, knowing Roosevelt’s penchant for changing his mind, whispered nervously to Hannegan of FDR’s comment about Truman: “Go back and get it in writing.” Claiming he had forgotten his coat, Hannegan ducked back in and asked Roosevelt for a note. The president scribbled on an envelope and handed it to him. He dashed back down the stairs and told Walker, “I’ve got it.”
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In his rush, Hannegan did not look at what FDR had written until later. Rather than mentioning Truman only, he had also listed Douglas as acceptable to him as his running mate.
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